Speaking of Not Deserving To Lose

A message to liberals. Stolen from Rachel Maddow, but I'd noticed it prior to her brilliant piece on it tonight, so whatever. Suppose that the 111th Congress had not passed the stimulus, health care, or financial reform, the three big-ticket items. What would the legislative achievements of that Congress look like? Mind you, I'm not talking about the fact that without the stimulus we'd be in Great Depression #2; I'm just asking, if you compare policy achievements under this Congress minus the Big 3 to policy achievements in other Congresses, how does it stack up?

Well, let's see. Fair pay for women. S-CHIP expansion. Tripling AmeriCorps. Land management. Pentagon contracts reform. Credit card reform. Regulation of tobacco. Reforming veteran's benefits. Iran sanctions and divestment. Student loan reform (a biggie!). Most of these would be major, major accomplishments for many or most Presidents. Many of them are on par with things like the ADA, Clintonian welfare reform, NCLB, etc., some of the signature accomplishments of the last three Presidents, like them or otherwise. That's ten major legislative accomplishments, by the way. Big ones. Not even counting the variety of small bills, or the reasonably failed programs like the mortgage restructuring thing that didn't work.

If we now add back in a) the largest tax cut, the largest infrastructure spending, the largest investment on clean energy, the largest fiscal stimulus, etc. in American history (with apologies to inflation), b) the largest expansion of health care in this country since 1965, and c) the first attempt at rolling back the deregulation of the Carter-Reagan-Clinton-Bush era, I think we have a pretty impressive Congress.

And all of this in the face of totally unified opposition from the Republicans, a balky caucus in the House (though a brilliant Speaker to manage them!), and a not-quite-governing majority in the Senate most of the time. We didn't have the majorities that FDR, or LBJ had. And we got an amount done in two years that is quite frankly comparable to those storied Presidents and Congresses. We also didn't get a lot done: cap-&-trade, immigration reform, DADT, DOMA, etc. etc. The lesson is that no President certainly since LBJ has been in office with so long a list of things that needed doing. So Obama entered office with a massive list of Important Things to get done. He got a lot of Important Things done. There are a lot of other Important Things he didn't get done, some of which are ostensibly in the same policy area as some of the things he did get done. It would've been nice if he had gotten more Important Things done. Maybe you think some of the Important Things he didn't get done he should've done instead of the Important Things he did get done. But he's done a whole lot. And he'll do a whole lot more if he has power going forward. Here's hoping.